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Month: April 2012

A little plastic, collected in and near the school yard on the corner:

one-half SPORTCRAFT® ping pong ball MADE IN CHINA. For more than a century, ping pong balls have been made of celluloid, the earliest form of synthetic plastic, created not from petroleum but nitrated cotton. They will supposedly catch fire pretty easily, which was one of the drawbacks of celluloid for wide use.

ORANGE ZOTZ wrapper

CHERRY ZOTZ wrapper

Skittles FunSize® wrapper featuring a winking rabbit in pink pants and a yellow shirt wearing head phones and carrying an ipod-like music player

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An oil tanker on the MS River, viewed from the levee south of the Lower Ninth Ward. The port of New Orleans is the busiest in North America by volume, and a major oil and gas hub.

I spent an unforgettable week in New Orleans that involved seeing the work Environmental Defense Fund is doing to restore coastal wetlands and cypress forests that once sheltered the city from storms. I met local colleagues, including Tracy Nelson and John Taylor from the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. This group is doing amazing work to bring food security to the neighborhood, which lacks a grocery store, and to rebuild the community, which was devastated by Katrina. And we saw some of the beautiful, eco-friendly homes Brad Pitt’s Make It Right organization has built.

At Bayou Bienvenue just north of the Lower Ninth Ward. This area of open water was once a cypress-tupelo swamp with the power to absorb the brunt of a storm surge. It should look like this, and hopefully someday it will again.

I also met the incredible New Orleans poets Megan Burns and Dave Brinks, who generously hosted me at their 17 Poets! reading series and took a video. Expat New Orleanians kept telling me during this trip that they had to leave the city and its seductive, narcotic pull to get anything done in their lives, but Megan and Dave disprove this — their Trembling Pillow Press has published nine books and just hosted its first book contest, judged by Bernadette Mayer. And they edit two literary journals and a monthly periodical between them, all while raising three children, writing their own books, and running a landmark bar in the French Quarter.

I did give in to the city’s pull on the last day, though, when I wandered the French Quarter drinking absinthe with CA Conrad, Maggie Zurawski and Jack the maltese, who stopped through on their Southern Poetry Tour. So many gifts in one week, even the fire ant attack in Louis Armstrong park couldn’t bring us down.

MUEHLENBECKIA Wire Vine plant tag Attractive Ground Cover! Unusual New Zealand native vine is semi deciduous. Tiny green leaves on thin wiry stems. Can be used for topiary. Trim or cut back as much as desired. Hardy to 10°F. Can twine 15-30 feet long. Placement: Good as ground cover, beach planting, and screen with support.

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Plastic catalog, in which I collect all the plastic I find in the half-mile between my home in Southeast Portland, Oregon, and the dog park at Mount Tabor.

green Odwalla juice cap

Skittles wrapper

KitKat wrapper

Colgate single use tooth cleaner thingy (These are among the most disgusting objects I find. Its tapered tail and flat head reminds me of a nasty little black crawly thing I found in my bathroom yesterday that might have been a beetle larvae. Ewwww. Don’t put that in your mouth!)

pale green packing peanut

two cigarette wrappers: be interpreted to mean safer. Nothing about this cigarette, packaging, or color should be interpreted to mean safer.

Portland poet Maryrose Larkin is author of Book of Ocean (ie press), The Name of this Intersection is Frost (Shearsman Books), Darc (FLASH+CARD), and Marrowing (airfoil). Her next book, The Identification of Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press. She is a member of the Spare Room Collective, as well as a co-editor of Flash+Card press.

Maryrose is interested in moving through the procedural into the unknowable.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press, 2004) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School, 2010) about a famous nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.”

Cobb’s work combines history, nonfiction narrative and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon.